Gridfailure – Irritum (Review)

New Gridfailure. Great. More nightmares tonight for me. Why do I even bother listening to this kind of stuff? I mean, what’s to like here? Is it the urbanised terror of an impending soulless apocalypse? Is it the gradually-encroaching realisation that everything you have ever loved and everyone you have ever known will eventually be taken form you? Is it the digitised psychic pain of countless trapped, hopeless lives? No? Then what? I’m really asking. What draws you, and me, to listen to something like Gridfailure. If you’re reading this then you must have at least a passing interest in hearing the aural equivalent of long-buried mental scars burrowing their way to the surface, so why do you subject yourself to it? Why do you, actively, probably passionately, seek out this experience, a horrific, mind-killing experience like Irritum? Go on, tell me. Please. I’m begging you. Because try as I might, I can’t help but really, really like Gridfailure’s work, so I need to know why I’m so irresistibly drawn to it. Maybe this says more about me than the music, but there’s something maddeningly relaxing about having your ears slowly bleed as you endure the 52 minutes of grim soundscapes that occupy the radiation-blasted landscape of this album’s playing time like corrupted mechanical cockroaches. Something about Irritum calls to me in binary, demanding to be understood by my hopelessly out-of-date grey matter, clawing at my subconscious, like a cyberdaemon being birthed behind my eyes. I mean, what the Hell? Why can’t I let go? Why do I rate this stuff so highly? Why do I think that Irritum is actually some of the best material that Gridfailure’s twisted controlling intelligence has conceived and unleashed so far? Maybe I’m just in pain, in deep, internal pain, and Irritum soothes me, by letting me know I’m not the only one suffering. Or maybe I’m just a masochist, torturing myself with prolonged exposure to industrialised fear. Or maybe I’m just deceiving myself. Maybe I’ve known the truth all along. In fact, I know I have, I’ve just been unwilling to admit it to myself, as if admitting something as terrible as this would make it somehow even more real than it already is. The real, true secret is terrible. Of course it is. The truth is, that I